The Components of Our Psychology

This month’s post is an excerpt from my 2019 book Independent Judgment and Introspection, pp. 88–99. Light edits and the omission of some paragraphs and all footnotes have been made.
 
 
Core Evaluations. Core evaluations are fundamental subconscious conclusions (evaluations) formed in childhood about ourselves, other people, and the world in general (reality). They are held as self-evident truths and operate as automatized habits to influence our future development and present actions. Self-esteem is formed as a cluster of core evaluations, based on our mental choices and physical actions over time, plus other less fundamental, mid-level evaluations. Specifically, self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and efficacy. Sense of life is the emotional sum and expression of our core evaluations and self-esteem.
 
Core evaluations are “few in number—probably less than ten,” says [psychologist Edith] Packer (pp. 4–5), formed early in life usually by emotional generalization, not conscious choice. Core evaluations are then held subconsciously to influence our future. And all of us are capable of holding, and often do hold, contradictory core evaluations, correct and rational ones along with those that are mistaken. “Mistaken core evaluations,” continues Packer, “are at the root of all defense mechanisms and most out-of-context emotions. They are at the base of all neurosis.” Core evaluations are the “autopilots” of our lives, habits and standing orders for good or ill, that guide the way we process new experiences, make choices, and act.
 
Emotional generalization, to further elaborate the process, begins with reactions to specific events, say, a father yelling at and calling his son a klutz (or worse) for spilling a glass of milk. The child may feel fear and anxiety for having done something wrong and probably hurt at the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event. Similar events repeated over time, may lead the child (the child’s subconscious integrating actions) to generalize the fear and hurt to other people, such as teachers, and in adulthood, to all other people he comes in contact with. The integrating actions, unexamined by the young child, see similarities between father, teachers, and others who yell. A core evaluation becomes established in the subconscious and automatized as, perhaps, “I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”
 
It is important to emphasize and to clarify that this is not environmental determinism. The child could have reacted differently to the spilled milk and name-calling father. And some children do react differently in such situations, by saying to themselves, for example, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do it on purpose. Father is being ridiculous!” Better teaching—of the parents, teachers, and other adults who yell at children and call them names when they make mistakes—would go a long way in countering the development of this and other similarly negative core evaluations. The adult needs to help the child process the event, not make the situation and the child’s psychology worse. Haim Ginott’s advice (chap. 2*), paraphrased, is appropriate here: “Oh, the milk spilled. Here’s a sponge. Let’s clean it up and get you another glass.” 
 
The ease with which children can draw mistaken conclusions indicates how important it is for their parents and other adults to be there for them, to support them, by finding out what is going on in their minds. In particular, they need to help children put words to their emotions by identifying the thoughts and evaluations that stand behind the feelings. This requires trust and intimacy. Unfortunately, says Packer (pp. 10, 12), “most children do not share many of their important thoughts and emotions with their parents,” or other adults. Core evaluations, both good and bad, build up brick by brick as “hundreds and hundreds” of concrete experiences.
 
The significance of core evaluations is that our subconscious applies them in the present to every new concrete experience remotely similar to the ones that gave rise to the core evaluation in the first place, “without our permission in the present,” to quote Packer’s choice words (p. 7).
 
Self-Esteem. Self-esteem is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.
 
The worthiness component of self-esteem is our certainty that we are valuable to ourselves, that we are our own highest value. Self-worth and self-respect are synonyms. This makes worthiness fundamentally egoistic; demands for self-sacrifice undercut it. If we value ourselves highly, we can easily value ourselves in addition as capable of being valued, that is, loved, by others. The source of this self-worth initially comes from the infant’s mother, then also from the father and other significant adults in the child’s surroundings. Holding and touching, plus verbal expressions of love, interact with the infant’s self-esteem to provide the warmth and security that young, as well as older, children need.
 
This means that around age two—the “terrible twos”—when children begin to assert themselves (sometimes opposing adults, sometimes just asserting their developing self-confidence), verbal abuse, such as yelling, name-calling, and irrational commands like “don’t be selfish,” plus physical abuse, including spanking by hand, are often experienced by the child as humiliating, or even threatening. These traditional techniques of child-rearing are the primary early influences that lead children to develop negative core evaluations, especially self-doubt about themselves, but also fear of others, and confusion or even negative conclusions about the world in which they live. Today’s permissive directionless parenting is just as bad, if not worse, because of the psychological chaos it creates.
 
The efficacy component of self-esteem is cognitive competence, the certainty that we can and do perform the actions necessary to use our minds properly, to identify rational values and act to acquire them. “Actions necessary to use our minds properly” means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts. This commitment requires us to monitor the contents and functioning of our conscious and subconscious minds. It means introspection to identify the nature, meaning, and cause of our emotions, which ultimately means to identify and correct any mistaken core and mid-level evaluations. Introspection must continue throughout our lives.
 
The two components of self-esteem influence and reinforce each other, so a high self-worth encourages and supports strong competency, and vice versa. Alternatively, low self-worth undercuts our competencies, and vice versa. High self-esteem is an accomplishment that has to be earned over many years and sustained with persistent monitoring. It is not experienced as a brag or boast, for example, as Packer puts it (p. 230), “Boy, I’m a great, worthy [and competent] person.” That is not self-esteem. “Rather, self-esteem is experienced as a total emotional state” that gives us “a certain calm and a sense of control—as if the most important issues about [ourselves are] settled.” Self-esteem is a quiet confidence. Its emotional expression is pride.
 
If put into words, a healthy self-esteem would say something to the effect, “I am confident that I am valuable to myself and others, deserving to be loved—by myself and others—as the honest and independent person I am. I am also competent to use my mind in a correct, rational way to make me happy in life.”  In Packer’s words (p. 230), self-esteem says, “I am basically fit for life. I do not have to doubt that fact.” Doubting oneself, or self-doubt, is expressed as the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety then is what generates our need for defensive maneuvers to defend against the unpleasant feeling.
 
Sense of Life. Core evaluations and self-esteem determine who we are as individuals. Sense of life expresses our identity as an emotional sum, a composite set of emotions that outwardly expresses our outlook on life. As Ayn Rand says (pp. 25-26), it is a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics.” Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality and our place in it, so the “pre-conceptual” part of our sense of life is our core evaluations from childhood formed through emotional generalizations that express who we are and what we think about other people and the world in which we live. Sense of life, according to Rand, “becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all [our] other emotions and underlies all [our] experiences” (italics Rand's).
 
Sense of life is what an artist projects in a work of art and what patrons of the arts respond to. If it could be put into words, a sense of life would say, from the artist’s perspective, “this is life as I see it,” and from the patron’s viewpoint, “this is how I do or do not see life.” Sense of life attracts and repels, so sense of life is what one falls in love with, or does not fall in love with. Sometimes, in experiencing an instant like or dislike of someone we meet, it is our sense of life meshing or clashing with the other person’s sense of life.
 
Sense of life, however, it must be emphasized, is a composite emotion and emotions are not infallible. Getting to know another person, whether as a friend or romantic partner, requires time and patience to explore and learn all of the other person’s values, ranging from the philosophical and abstract to the everyday and concrete. Judging another person is even more difficult. Judging whether another person is honest and independent requires close interaction before a reliable conclusion can be drawn. Sense of life only gives clues, both to one’s own subconscious and to that of others.
 
 
* I seem to have inadvertently changed Ginott’s example from “juice” to “milk.”

The Two Senses of Self-Esteem and Pride—Moral and Psychological

Self-esteem and pride, respectively, are a moral value and virtue. Both rest on the more fundamental attributes of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
The two kinds, moral and psychological, interact to produce the degree of self-respect or self-worth that we hold about ourselves.*
 
Self-esteem in the moral sense means holding one’s self as one’s own highest value, which means never sacrificing to others or others to oneself. The virtue of pride is the action of living up to one’s own moral values, which includes being true even to one’s non-moral, rational values, living for the sake of our own happiness.**
 
Moral values are what we seek to acquire and maintain to support our lives as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Virtues are the acts or practice of acquiring and maintaining those values.
 
Ayn Rand describes pride as “moral ambitiousness,” always doing what one judges to be right. This means holding, and always acting on, the more fundamental moral values (and corresponding virtues) of reason, independence, honesty, integrity, courage, justice, and productiveness.
 
For this reason, Aristotle calls pride the “crown of the virtues”—the climax or point of culmination, so to speak, of morality.
 
Self-esteem and pride are required to uphold and practice a rational egoism that promotes and exhibits one’s self-interest and joy in life—without harming oneself or others.
 
However, neither self-esteem nor pride in the moral sense can be achieved or maintained without a store of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 95-96), self-esteem in the psychological sense:

is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.

Psychological self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and mental competence to live life to the fullest. Pride in the psychological sense is an emotion, the emotional consequence and expression of self-esteem.
 
Pretending to or hoping to be worthy and competent, along with protestations that “I am a proud person” or “boy, I’m great,” are not genuine. They are the defensive result of psychological problems and conflicts, making the moral counterparts more difficult to achieve and practice.
 
Genuine self-esteem and pride produce a “quiet confidence,” as psychologist Edith Packer (p. 230) says, and a feeling that “I am fit for life.”
 
The development of psychological self-esteem begins in childhood and requires, for the worthiness component, an unconditional love from parents and other adults around the child. For cognitive competency, the child needs to be taught what is necessary to use his or her mind properly, which in particular means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts, along with methods of identifying the nature and causes of his or her emotions.
 
A child and, later, adult who has been given strong doses of love in childhood will conclude “I am loved and am capable of being loved by others because I am confident in and reliant on myself.” The child who feels competent concludes “I can and do use my mind well to guide me throughout life.”
 
As psychologist Nathaniel Branden (p. 130) points out, self-esteem and pride in both senses of the words often begin at the same time early in life—crawling, walking, and banging a spoon on the table, for example, can produce an emotion of the efficacy of psychological self-esteem combined with the virtue of moral pride.
 
Unfortunately, most of us were not taught much of anything about our psychologies. Thus, the psychological problems we suffer in childhood arise from errors in thinking about ourselves, other people, and the world in general—Edith Packer’s mistaken core evaluations (chap. 1). These errors not only undercut developing self-esteem in the psychological sense, but they also confound our understanding and practice of the moral concepts.
 
A weak worthiness or confidence component of self-esteem—“I’m no good and the world is out to get me”—for example, may affect the adult’s practice of integrity and courage. A weak mental competence—"I’m so stupid I can’t do anything right”—may affect the adult’s independence, sense of justice, and pursuit of a productive career.
 
Mistakes in morality due to the influence of our psychologies, it must be emphasized, do not necessarily deserve condemnation, as long as our fears and failures do not cause harm to others. This is called an error in knowledge, not a breach of morality.
 
The difference in briefest essence of the two meanings of self-esteem and pride are as follows. In the moral sense: I am good (my own highest value) and I do good (always doing what I know to be right). In the psychological sense: I have confidence in myself as good and worthy and can think and do things well to make me happy, with the resulting pleasure in accomplishment.***
 
The worthiness component of psychological self-esteem gives us confidence essentially to do whatever we choose to do and is a direct connection to moral self-esteem. The pleasure of psychological pride feeds into the desire for “moral ambitiousness.”
 
 
* It is unfortunate and sometimes confusing, though not uncommon, that the English language uses the same word for essentially different referents. That the moral and psychological interact with each other only makes clarification of the present terms more challenging. A brief discussion of the moral and psychological meanings of self-esteem and pride can be found in Branden (pp. 298-99).
 
** Non-moral, rational values are optional in the sense that they do not have to be accepted and practiced by everyone in order to have a good character. They might be universal for our physical well-being, such as the generic value of food, but if we specify vanilla ice cream, then that value is clearly not one that everyone has to accept. This optional nature of non-moral values can also apply to choice of career, romantic partner, or the means of building a bridge, though in some cases universal moral values may be relevant. See my discussion here.
 
*** Criminal personalities, on the other hand, according to Stanton Samenow (chap. 3), think of themselves as both worthless (“I am a zero, a nothing”) and evil, but “If I thought of myself as evil,” said one offender, “I couldn’t live.” Criminals, thus, are masters at rationalization to prevent themselves from being aware of their inner selves.

The Role of Honor in Moral Revolutions

In her 1974 West Point Military Academy address, Ayn Rand said, “Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.” It is a sense of worthiness and competence that others can see in one’s deportment. It is not pseudo-self esteem that requires praise or respect from others lest an affront occur that demands satisfaction. It is not psychological dependence.

Yet that is precisely what Kwame Appiah in his book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen means by honor. The book is interesting because it chronicles the role of honor, or at least what certain cultures have understood to be honor, in supporting and eventually eliminating the practices of dueling, footbinding, and slavery.

Appiah also suggests a desperately needed role for honor in bringing about an end to the modern, horrific practice of honor killing.

The Primacy of Psychology

In a previous post, I argued that method is primary in education, not content. By method I meant teaching students how to think conceptually. In the process of learning how to think, content would follow. In the current post, I would like to broaden this theme to the primacy of psychology, to teaching the effective use one’s mind in controlling and guiding behavior.

The primacy of psychology means cultivating the development of the child’s independent, uniquely individual self, that is, cultivating the growth of a strong conviction of worthiness and efficacy sufficient to guide the child to acquire the knowledge, values, and skills necessary to live a happy life without making compromises to please others. As I often find myself telling my students, “That last sentence was a mouthful. Let’s break it down into a few digestible chunks.”

First, “worthiness and efficacy” refer to the child’s self-esteem. Not the watered-down superficial stuff that the government schools promote, such as awarding bumper stickers to children for being first in their class for attendance or getting all A’s. This is a comparative award that makes children feel superior to all the others, not loveable or competent. Feeling worthy means “I am loveable, capable of being loved.” It is a deep conviction that begins in the relationship with the children’s parents (and relatives) and continues to develop (or become thwarted) in their relationships with teachers. Positive experiences from such friendships promote worthiness, negative experiences degrade it.

The same is true for the development of efficacy, which is a sense of competence, of being able to do things in the world. Children need frequent senses of accomplishment, whether it be learning the multiplication tables or whittling the image of a dog on a piece of pine. What children accomplish does not matter as long as they keep feeling that sense of accomplishment. Worthiness and efficacy influence and reinforce each other. The feeling “I can’t do it” often leads to the feeling “I’m no good” and the “I’m no good” feeling often leads to and encourages the “I can’t do it.” Self-esteem is prerequisite for and concomitant to the acquisition of an education.

“Knowledge, values, and skills” are the content of education. Because life is action, all education in essence is the acquisition of skill. And skill is the application of knowledge and values whether it be the technique and importance of performing a good car wash, a good weld, a good sale, a good lecture, a good design, or a good moral decision. Everything we do in life is a behavior, driven by what we know and value in the performance of the task. The aim of education, then, is to ensure that we possess sufficient self-esteem to acquire the knowledge and values necessary to pursue our chosen tasks in life. Those tasks may not be reading English literature or solving quadratic equations. They are what the child wants to pursue, not what the teacher wants to teach. Demanding that children study certain subjects in order to be “well-rounded” or exhorting them to acquire “knowledge for its own sake” is a prescription for many to drop out. Control and choice in their own education is what children require for both their self-esteem and their future.*

Finally, “without making compromises to please others” refers to independence (1, 2). Because government-run schools demand the opposite, as do many parents and other adults, independence is the least understood and least taught of psychological skills. Some few children are naturals at standing up for themselves. Most need guidance in understanding that they do not have to go along with their peers or significant adults if they do not agree with what is being asked of them. High self-esteem and a strong sense of personal identity are required to be able to say that the emperor has no clothes. Independence—independent judgment and independent action—can be taught, but educators today have a long way to go before they begin to understand what is required to achieve this feat.


*As I discuss in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (pp. 56, 144-46), “well-roundedness” is probably a slap at egoism, because it is “selfish” to concentrate in only one area of interest, and acquiring “knowledge for its own sake” is a hobby of privileged elites.

Questions about Independent Judgment

The boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is often admired for his independent judgment, that is, for his courage to speak a truth that the adults feared to acknowledge openly. Two questions, however, can be asked about independent judgment as a virtue. One, can everyone really practice it (besides naive children) or is it the province of true creators and innovators, such as Socrates and Galileo? And, perhaps giving rise to doubts expressed in the first question, a second asks, how does one handle the dangers of independent judgment, that is, the prospect of offending other people, sometimes resulting in death (Socrates) or house arrest (Galileo)?

Independent judgment is correct perception of the facts of reality and the courage to acknowledge and assert them. The two questions above arise because of complicating factors; intelligence and interest can affect the initial perception and other people can affect both the initial perception and the assertion of it. Psychology plays a role throughout.

Great innovators, especially those who challenge centuries of convention, are highly intelligent. They also are extremely interested and motivated in their areas of innovation. Those of us who do not possess the same intelligence or interest, whether college professor or blue collar worker, can nevertheless use our intelligence in our areas of interest to perceive and assert what we do see. Intelligence combined with interest determines who is likely to see ahead of others, and those of us who do not see initially can learn from those who do, but intelligence is not a prerogative of the highly educated. Independent judgment can be practiced equally by a garage door repairman as by a scientist.

So why don’t more people practice independent judgment? Which is to ask, why are they so afraid to join the boy in the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? The answer is fear, real or imagined, of what might happen to them. The real fear of death or incarceration that can result from speaking one’s mind poses a needless moral quandary for some. We have no moral obligation to drink hemlock, as Socrates did, in order to preserve our independent judgment. Many in the Soviet Union managed to maintain theirs by expressing it to family and trusted friends, sometimes speaking in a foreign language to prevent nosy neighbors from overhearing their conversations and reporting them. They were conventional on the outside, in public, to preserve their lives, but independent on the inside, at home, to preserve their self-esteem.

Most of us do not face the real fears of a Socrates, Galileo, or citizen of the Soviet Union. Our fears of expressing independent judgment stem from what others might think of us. Disapproval, maybe rejection, is the worst that might happen, yet the anxiety caused by the fear can be so strong as to blur our perception of the facts, thus preventing any expression of an independent judgment. When choices based on fear build up over time, habits of perceiving reality through clouded lenses become established patterns of behavior. Seeing the world through the eyes of others, whoever those significant others may be, becomes the norm. Conventionality is the result.

Can independent judgment be taught? Yes, but from an early age. Children need, of course, to be given love and support, but they also need to be given freedom, within limits appropriate to their maturity, to choose their own values. And they need to be allowed to learn from their mistakes. Most parents are loving toward infants, but when the children move into their “terrible twos,” parents begin controlling and in some cases hitting. Often, the controlling continues throughout childhood and becomes a constant in traditional schools. Choice and self-assertion are seen as signs of disruption and disobedience to authority. In reality, they are signs of developing self-esteem and personal identity. When they are erased by the controlling, authoritarian behavior of adults, children quickly get the message that getting along means going along. It is a rare child who matures as an adult with independent judgment intact. Perhaps this is why we tend to think that only certain people can fully achieve it.

Independent judgment is a fundamental requirement of the free society. Unless every adult citizen possesses a significant amount of self-esteem expressed as independent judgment, such a society cannot last.